Son of a BOT!!!

My apologies on the blog title sounding a little offensive. The way things are shaping up in the world around us, the days are not far when the title might actually represent an evolutionary fact.

The last weeks I have been running into articles on BOTS and how they are here to stay. The clincher that made me write this one was the ugly virtual world spat between Mark & Musk (No, that’s not a name of deodorant) on the public domain. They were actually fighting over whose intelligence fared better on artificial intelligence.

In the 80’s the standard high school essay/ debate topic was Computers – A Boon or Bane.  Today it could well be BOTS- A boon or bane.  Me being an illiterate in the virtual world, the first time I encountered the word BOT, I asked someone and they told me that it was a virtual Robot. My first memories of a Robot are watching a serial as a kid called Giant Robot (Robot to be read as Row Boat) and ended with Rajni’s Endhiran.

At the turn of the millennium I also had to decipher funny skewed alpha numeric images before I could log onto my bank account and they looked as scary as the balance in my account. They were called CAPTCHA’s. I was again told by learned virtual world gurus that they were there to prevent BOTs and not to test my eyesight or my IQ.

Now I read, a BOT can bring happiness into my life an application I’m sceptical about, simply because a BOT cannot measure the number of tear drops that roll down a cheek (at least until now).  Emotions cannot be outsourced to an algorithm however brilliant it might be, is my opinion. There is another BOT that can actually tell me the recipe of a Pani Poori by its image, but in my opinion cracking the source of the paani in the poori at the road side Yadav Food Stall would still be a far cry for these advanced BOTS.

I was told BOTS and Artificial Intelligence was here to stay which means I need to do away with my natural intelligence.  I intend approaching Baba Ramdev who is fighting a lone battle for natural products; I wouldn’t be surprised to find a PATABOT spring out of the Patanjali stables as the first BOT that depends fully on natural intelligence.

The capitalist in me wants to have a butler like Jarvis as Mark has, but my socialist side tells me humans should not be made redundant by some machine that was created by man.

‘’If we create some digital super-intelligence that exceeds us in every way by a lot, it is very important it be benign’’ - Elon Musk